About this Poem

The electric charge of any good poem is a matter of friction: the physical force resisting the relative motion of stanzas, lines, sentences, phrases, syllables, consonants, vowels, and other material elements sliding against each other. Children feel this charge whether or not they grasp every nuance of a poem’s ideas.

Some of the most finely charged poems in existence can be found in the anonymous trove of Mother Goose Rhymes. For my poem about the noble mussel for J. Patrick Lewis’s excellent animal anthology, I tried to emulate the force and motion of Mother Goose while using modern vocabulary and imagery.